Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists

blogs.lse.ac.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 63 posts

Re: How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists

#41

Post by ouid »

startupdiscuss wrote: post #2

This is a good guide, but I will tell you a trick that is faster, easier, and more effective: read 2 or 3 papers. All that effort you would put into doing these steps? Instead, read 1 or 2 other papers that the author refers to in the beginning. Science is a conversation. When you read the other papers, even if you don't understand them at first, you will get a sense of the conversation. Also, some writers are abysma…

There is a huge variety in the quality of writing in scientific papers, but most of it is bad, or at least totally opaque, so I'm not sure that 3 papers will give you a sense of what is good, or even have a high probability of containing a paper that you can use as an entry point, although I think your premise is correct.

Probably the best evidence that a paper is a good entry point is whether or not the author cared about the abstract. A lot of scientists treat it as a chore, picking some key points from the premise, methodology, and conclusion sections, and haphazardly pasting them together into a miniature version of the paper. An abstract is a sketch of your argument. It's supposed to be how the author thinks about the work they are doing, in terms of how it relates to the work everyone else is doing. Look for an abstract which presents an argument in plain english and isn't afraid to give a little background or motivation. It might take dozens to find one though.

Re: How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists

#43

Post by ChuckMcM »

Oh this is awesome, well presented and clear.

A couple of notes, generally if you email the author of a paper they will send you a copy. Scholar.google.com can be used to evaluate the other papers referenced, highly cited ones will be 'core' to the question, less highly cited ones will address some particular aspect of the research.

For any given paper, if it cites one or two seminal papers in the field, you can build a citation cloud to create what is best described as the 'current best thinking on this big question'. You do that by following up the citations and their citations for two or three hops. (kind of like a web crawler).

With something like sci-hub and some work on PDF translation, it should be possible to feed two or three 'seed' papers to an algorithm and have it produce a syllabus for the topic.

Re: How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists

#44

Post by nonbel »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #31
nonbel wrote: post #24

There is a difference between reading and studying a paper. Many papers I just check the abstract for claims of A causes/correlates B (ie it is a "headline" claim), and look for a scatter plot of A vs B (it is missing). Then I do ctrl-F "blind" (can't find it), ctrl-F "significance" (see p-value with nearby text indicating it has been misinterpreted). Boom, paper done in under a minute. There is really no reason to s…

This only works for a very small subset of studies in a subset of scientific fields.

Agreed, the OP was about medical research though, where it does apply.

Re: How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists

#45

Post by choxi »

> As you read, write down every single word that you don’t understand. You’re going to have to look them all up (yes, every one. I know it’s a total pain. But you won’t understand the paper if you don’t understand the vocabulary. Scientific words have extremely precise meanings).

That's a great tip. I've found that a lot of papers aren't necessarily complicated, but the vocabulary is unfamiliar (but you experience the same sense of confusion with both). It's interesting that we often conflate complexity with unfamiliarity, my reading comprehension abilities improved quite a bit by understanding the difference between the two.

Re: How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists

#46

Post by neutronicus »

I have a little "hack" that I find extremely helpful for getting a sense of specific research fields.

Journal articles, even review papers, are cramped for space and so tend to be very dense. The author suggests methods for doing battle with this density, but I suggest that, before doing that, you search for a class of document that's allowed to be as expansive as the author desires, and whose authors have recently struggled to learn and understand their content, and so tend to be expansive:

PhD Theses

Find out what research group published the research, find out which graduate students have recently graduated from that group, and read their theses (if the author's command of the language of publication isn't what you'd prefer ... find another graduate student). I guarantee you it will function much better as an introduction to what the group does than trying to parse any of their journal publications. In particular, the "draw the experiment" step will often be solved for you, with photographs, at least in the fields where I've done this.

Re: How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists

#48

Post by iron0012 »

nonbel wrote: post #24

There is a difference between reading and studying a paper. Many papers I just check the abstract for claims of A causes/correlates B (ie it is a "headline" claim), and look for a scatter plot of A vs B (it is missing). Then I do ctrl-F "blind" (can't find it), ctrl-F "significance" (see p-value with nearby text indicating it has been misinterpreted). Boom, paper done in under a minute. There is really no reason to s…

The importance you place on the presence of a p-value suggests that you're probably not the best judge of whether a p-value is correctly interpreted.

Re: How to read and understand a scientific paper: a guide for non-scientists

#50

Post by PeterisP »

glup wrote: post #20

I don't understand the opposition to abstracts: dense means high information content, so if you know the field you can learn a whole lot (like whether you should read this paper or another one).

Abstracts often are misleading.

They're useful to decide whether you should read this paper or another one, but they're often not useful to get a summary of what exactly the paper actually achieves. Often the abstract will imply a more interesting result by leaving out key aspects and limitations (which are detailed in the paper and its conclusions) that significantly change the impact of the paper, the abstract often is more like an advertisement for the paper than an effective summary. I mean, it may be, but if I'd read just the abstract and go away thinking, "oh, so now there's a way to do X", I'd often be wrong.

Post reply on HN